Political analysis:The issue may end up being little more than a distraction, writes Stephen Collins.
The expectation across the political spectrum last night was that the issue of the Taoiseach's personal finances will now begin to fade into the background, following his detailed statement about the financing of his house.
The issue has dominated media coverage in the first two weeks of the election campaign and there is not a great deal of time left for the parties to slug it out on the basic issues of the economy and the state of the public services.
However, there is no guarantee that a change in the focus of the debate will actually help the two Government parties regain the initiative. In fact, if the Opposition claims are to be believed, it will only make things worse for Mr Ahern and his Government.
All the parties, those in government and opposition, are united in saying that the issue of Mr Ahern's finances is not coming up on the doorsteps to any great extent. However, the parties have different motives for pushing this line and their views should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Even if Mr Ahern's finances are not coming up on a great number of doorsteps, that does not mean they are not an election issue. Last Friday's Irish Times poll indicated that 50 per cent of the electorate believes they are an election issue.
Fianna Fáil would obviously like to minimise the importance of the issue. To accept that it is a matter of great concern to the public would be to undermine a central element of the party's election strategy which is to emphasise Mr Ahern's popularity as a reason for giving it a third term in a row.
Fine Gael and Labour are both deeply reluctant to play up the issue, for fear of provoking a backlash of sympathy for the Taoiseach, so they are not interested in promoting the notion that it is being widely talked about on the doorsteps.
"The truth of the matter is that it is coming up a bit in middle-class areas and it has certainly contributed to the mood for change in certain constituencies," said one Labour activist. He added, however, that Mr Ahern's finances were not an issue in working-class areas where the focus truly was on the state of the public services.
The damage this is doing to the Government's re-election prospects could be considerable.
The central claim of Fianna Fáil and the PDs, that their return to office is necessary for continued prosperity, was targeted at the middle classes, but these are precisely the voters who are most likely to be swayed into the anti-Government camp by concerns about the Taoiseach's finances.
In particular, PD voters in affluent urban areas are most likely to be influenced by the issue. Hence the zig-zag movements of Tánaiste Michael McDowell, as he struggled to find a way through the political minefield.
Mr McDowell's problem is that the only way that he can bring his party back into government is with Fianna Fáil, but the question marks surrounding that party's leader go to the heart of the reason the PDs were founded just over 21 years ago.
In his effort to insist on accountability and standards in public office, while keeping his political lifeline intact, the Tánaiste has found himself adopting contradictory positions. The strategy he finally adopted of insisting on a public statement from the Taoiseach and then leaving it to the voters to adjudicate was probably the best position he could have ended up in. The problem was that he took such a complicated route to get there.
As far as the Taoiseach is concerned, he will be hoping that the issue will finally go away after today. With his visit to London tomorrow to address parliament and his television debate with Enda Kenny on Thursday night, he can be reasonably confident that other issues will finally predominate for the remainder of the campaign.
The Opposition will be quite willing to facilitate him in the belief that they will actually do better if the focus goes on to straight political issues.
Enda Kenny's declaration that he is more interested in the country's future than the Taoiseach's past neatly summed up the mood.
Of course, whatever they say in public, the Opposition parties found the Taoiseach's problems an unexpected bonus.
At the very least, it disrupted the Fianna Fáil campaign and was a huge distraction for the Taoiseach in the first two weeks of the election.